The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Programmable memory devices such as eFuses and antifuses often use sense amplifiers to discretize between a blown or unblown eFuse or antifuse resistive state. Conventional sense amplifiers typically have a trip-point that is more sensitive to power supply voltage than may be desirable and/or are subject to kick back noise (e.g., voltage coupling or gate/source following behavior). For a wide statistical distribution of a blown eFuse, tail bits can exhibit relatively small resistive values, leading to a high yield impact if the read circuitry is not accurate enough. The equivalent input resistive threshold (trip-point) stability through process voltage, and temperature variations (PVT corner) is often used for sense amplifier assessment. Conventional static or dynamic sense amplifiers typically exhibit a wider trip-point spread with respect to different PVT corners than may be desirable, particularly for low voltage applications.